


The Winding Path

by Jashasedai, theianitor



Series: Traveling The Long Road [1]
Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - Serial Killers, Autopsies, Blood, Dead People, Gore, Horror, M/M, Mentions others, Serial Killers, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 08:55:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 18,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16472492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jashasedai/pseuds/Jashasedai, https://archiveofourown.org/users/theianitor/pseuds/theianitor
Summary: Jenson has a difficult young man living in his house, but most people can be taught to behave.Christian has a difficult case, but with hard work and dedication, most things can be resolved.When it comes down to it, everything is connected.The First Part of the Long Road series.Part 2The Dusty Roadhttps://archiveofourown.org/works/10023647/chapters/22343519and Part 3The Lonely Highwayhttps://archiveofourown.org/works/16470821/chapters/38573402





	1. The Bright Room

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is way out of my box. Way, way out of it. :) I've had fun here, but please read this with the following in mind: it's all made up.  
> Thank you Jash, for everything. <3

“Sebastian!  Come over here.”  Jens points sharply at the floor beside him.  “I need you to hold this for me.”

He picks up a pair of white leather gloves from the tray beside the operating table and hands them to the teenage boy who is shivering in his bare feet and dirty basketball shorts and nothing else.  “The most important thing is to always wear your gloves, darling.  So there are no fingerprints left behind.”

When the boy has put on the gloves, Jens runs his own gloves, black with the distinctive two red fingers on the right hand, over the boy’s cheeks.  He picks up a scalpel off the tray.  “Now, remember, dear, cut deeply through the corpse’s skin, from the xyphoid, down to the navel, making sure you do not damage the membrane underneath.”

He puts his hands on the boy’s shoulders and turns him towards the woman on the slab.  It is a young woman in her early 20’s.  She has blonde hair and big blue eyes.  She could be mistaken for Sebastian’s sister, who had died several years before.  When he’d come to live with Jens.

“Make the incision,” Jens whispers into the boy’s ear.

The woman on the slab whimpers through her gag and shakes her head.

The boy looks up at the man.  “If I help you, you’ll let me go?”

“Of course, when we’re finished with the autopsy.”  He turns the boy back to the task in front of him.

Sebastian begins his first incision.

 

\--

 

Jens sat on the severe leather sofa and patted his mouth with a white handkerchief.  That had been quite...brutal…

The way the boy’s frantic energy and apologies to the corpse had suddenly turned into anger.  He had ruined the autopsy, there was nothing left to examine in the chest cavity but the liver, when he had finished.

It had been...exhilarating.

The boy, Sebastian, he would have to think of him as Sebastian, now.  He was his assistant, after all, not the half naked waif who had run around the house and office like vermin, stealing food where he could.

Jens had almost forgotten his presence.

Since he’d found him in the back of a corpse’s car when he brought it in, and explained to him that he couldn't be allowed to leave.  Since then, he had kept himself out of Jens’ way.

Catching sight of him, really NOTICING him, for the first time in 3 years, had been something of a shock.

 

\--

 

The man unlocked the three locks on the outside door and went out of the house.  The boy crept out of the nest he’d made in the space behind the water heater, and carefully replaced the crawlspace wall panel.

There was a half eaten piece of bran toast on the plate in the sink.  It was smeared with avocado.  The boy wolfed it down, carefully picked up every crumb from the plate and the sink, and then checked the table.  There was a greasy smear of avocado on it.  He leaned down to lick it when the kitchen door opened.

He was so terrified of being caught in the act of stealing food that he never considered pushing past the man and running out the open door.

The tall, pristine blonde man was equally shocked.

 

He had seen the boy around.  Had gone and torn him free of his hidey hole behind the heater to punish him for the broken lock on the pantry.

The boy had screamed that he was starving and that if Jens was going to keep him in here and never let him go, then he had to at least feed him.

That certainly wasn't the case.  Jens wasn’t responsible for some boy who had been too stupid to jump out of the car when it was picked up.  He was angry that he had to take time out of his day to punish some child who couldn’t even show enough respect not to damage his home.

The weakness in his leg was gone.  How long ago had that been?  He was no longer a grubby faced child.  He was still disgusting, who wouldn't be, Jens scoffed at the thought, living in the _walls_?

 

He was tall, now, with blonde curls that were suspiciously clean.  Jens had thought his shampoo had been running out unusually quickly, lately.  He was frozen, bent at the waist, tongue out, hovering over a smudge of food on the table.

Jens considered him.

He could work from home today.

“Are you hungry?” He asked.  “You must be, if you’re ready to eat the table.”

Despite himself the young man grinned.

“Sit down,” Jens told him.

He did, immediately.

Jens unlocked the refrigerator and got out the gallon of skim milk.  He unlocked the pantry and got a loaf of bread and another avocado.  He put the bread in the toaster and sliced the avocado.

The young man watched Jens’ hands as he efficiently peeled the fruit and removed the stone.

“You like knives?” Jens asked.

“I know you do.” He answered.  He was eying the fat chunk of flesh left on the stone of the avocado.   Jens saw where he was looking and picked it up.

“Hungry?” He asked.

He looked wary.

He set the avocado stone down and folded his hands.  “I am a patient man, but I will insist, as you know, upon being treated with respect.  While you are living in my home, you will behave with the sort of manners that befit a polite young man.”  He picked up the stone again.

“Are you hungry?”

“Yes, sir, may I have some food, please?”

“Open your mouth.”

He did.

“Farther.”

He held the stone careful, it was slippery, and placed it in the young man’s mouth, continuing to keep a hold on it. He kept eye contact while it was sucked clean.

“That’s right.”  He said.

He removed the stone from the young man’s mouth and threw it into the trash along with the peel.

The toast popped up.

 

Jens stood and spread the toast with avocado, and pushed the plate towards the boy.  “Eat this,” He said, carelessly.  “If you are going to continue to live here, I am going to insist you dress properly, and take care of yourself.”  He sneered at the boy’s stained, too small shorts and flaccid muscles.

“We’re going to have to make arrangements.  It was one thing you living here rent free when you were a child, but you are 18 now.”

He froze, mouth open with half chewed food visible.  “How do you know I’m 18?”

Jens made a face and touched the young man’s chin to close his mouth.  Barbaric.  “There was a rerun of the report you’d gone missing on your birthday, three months ago.”  It had probably been longer than that.  He thought it had been before the broken lock incident. 

His blood still boiled at the thought, but the boy...man, had taken his punishment and had returned to his usual docile obedience.

A rebellious streak a mile wide and all it had taken was Jens forgetting to leave half his breakfast every morning.

Still, he had been good, since then.

“They’re still looking for me?” Hope dawned in his eyes.

“No.  They found a body in a creek a month later they determined was you.  No one is looking anymore, and the body was killed by a fall, so they aren’t looking for cause.”  Jens was getting annoyed.  The man needed to learn to focus for more than 10 seconds at a time.

He watched the hope flair out and die.

He liked that expression.

“Now I have a certain hobby.  You might call me an amateur mortician.”

The young man nodded.  “I know.”

“I know, I have seen you watching me work with the corpses.”  He gave the boy a moment to ripen and burst.

“Doesn’t it bother you when they scream?” He whispered.

“Not at all,” Jens said, brightly, “Corpse’s often make strange sounds as fluids settle and gasses escape.  The human body is marvelous.  That is why it’s so important for me to examine it.  You never know what sort of scientific leaps can result from the study of post-mortem tissues.”

“But they’re all alive,” He murmured, like he had to say it but hoped he wouldn’t hear him, “They’re all alive when you cut them up.”

Jens leaned forward.  “Of course they aren’t.  From the moment we are born we begin to die.  Sometimes it takes a corpse awhile to realize it.”

The boy finished the last bite of toast and stood up.

“Sit.  Down.” Jens smiled fiercely.  “Since you will be needing to pay your way if we are going to continue our arrangement as roommates, I have decided to hire you as my assistant.  I won’t be able to pay you, of course.  But in your tenure, you’ll learn many wonderful things, and if you ever decide to set up a practice of your own, of course you’ll have my letter of recommendation to take with you anywhere.”

“Anywhere?” He asked, sitting down.

“Of course...what is your name?  I can’t keep calling you brat.”

“Sebastian.”

“Wonderful name, of course, Sebastian.  My reputation will get doors opened for you anywhere.  You only have to spend some time as my assistant.”

Sebastian reached over the table and took Jens’ hand.  “You have a deal.”

 

\--

 

Jens looked up as Sebastian came down the stairs.  He was dressed in one of Jens’ turtleneck sweaters and a pair of pressed black trousers.  He was clean, actually clean.  His face was ruined with shaving nicks and blots of bath tissue.

He stood up to look over this fine specimen.  “When I said you should shave, I should have specified, the hedge trimmer is for down below.  The razor is for your face,” He joked.  He turned Sebastian’s face this way and that.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Who taught you to shave?”  The cuts were all going against the grain of the hair, or along, any which way.

Sebastian looked down.  “No one.  I had to work it out myself.”

Jens touched his cheek lightly.  “I will teach you,” He said, breath husky.

“Everything?” Sebastian breathed.

To Jens’ shock he leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his lower lip.  His mouth was slightly open, and his lips were on either side on Jens’.

“Ugh!”  Jens jumped back, shoving the boy away.  His rage came up and he saw red. 

Before the mist settled completely, he heard the boy wail, “I’m sorry, I thought you wanted me!”

Want?  A brazen little twink like him???

Disgusting.

 

\--

 

That had been two years ago.

Sebastian no longer slept in the crawl space.  He had his own bedroom.  Of course he’d been caught doing something disgusting, something that he’d been able to do in the crawl space as much as possible, so his door had been removed from its hinges.

He was steady handed, now, could perform a whole autopsy, beginning to end, without any difficulty.  He could even be trusted on acquisitions, and _he_ never made the mistake of picking up a corpse while there was a kid asleep on the back seat.

Jens never let there be any misunderstanding about the nature of their relationship after the first kill they made together, after Sebastian stupidly assaulted him, and made Jens punish him again.

He never called him Sebastian again, either.

He called him twink, or slut.

Especially when he was proud of him.

Sebastian crept down the hall, wondering if he had time to take a shower before Jens left for the office and locked the doors to the bathroom.

Maybe he could still squeeze behind the water heater.  It was a crawl space, right?  That meant it was assumed grown ups would have to be able to crawl into it.

So he was in the crawl space when the kitchen door exploded inward, and a mass of police in body armor, with big guns stormed in, shouting and knocking things over.

Jens was stepping out of the bedroom when there was a crash from the kitchen.  His temper flared.  What had Sebastian ruined now?  He stormed towards the kitchen as armed men stormed around the corner coming his way.

“Stop!  Jenson Button you are under arrest!”  One shouted.  “You are being charged with serial homicide.  You have the right to remain silent.”

“It wasn’t me!” Jens screamed.  “It was the boy.  He did it.  He’s there, in that room.”  He pointed a foot towards Sebastian’s bedroom, because the men had already cuffed him.

“The room is clear.”

“The hidey-hole,” Jens spat.  “He’s in the crawl space, the water heater beside the pantry!”

The officers dragged him with them into the kitchen.  The wall cover had been thrown against the far wall.  The remains of the kitchen door swung in the breeze, and Sebastian was long gone.

Jens felt a sense of relief.  

He palmed one of the waiting death capsules that were scattered around the house for occasions such as this.  We are all dying from the moment we’re born.  Some corpses just haven’t realized yet.

Run, Sebastian, he thought.  You will have my recommendation wherever you go, dear boy.

He popped the pill into his mouth.

He knew he was a corpse already.


	2. Clues

Christian was uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. Maybe a handful of times throughout his entire career had he walked through a scene and felt watched and unsafe, despite knowing there were no people in the house except for his colleagues. The Button house had risen to the top of his creepy-list, number one with a bullet.

Only there were no bullets. They had been working the house for hours and the local crime scene-guys had already been through the rooms, the attic, and the basement, taking most of the loose items in the house with them into evidence. There hadn’t been a single bullet or casing, and no guns. The house was clean to the point of feeling sterile, and there were no personal items. No pictures or albums, no trinkets on shelves or letters saved in a drawer. There wasn’t even a cover on the bed. It spoke volumes about the man still waiting on a slab at the coroner’s, and yet told them nothing at all about him.

Christian nodded at the tech standing in the door to the little room next to the pantry. The little room wasn’t as clean as the rest of the house, dirt and grime had clearly been dragged out from the crawl space in the wall, settling in an outward fading pattern on the floor. The storm troopers had said that Button had pointed the space out before he killed himself, yelling something about a boy supposedly hiding in there. Only there had been no boy.

He walked past a home office, as organized and neat as everywhere else. Definitely better kept than his own office, Christian thought. There was a heavy lock on the door. There were locks everywhere. The pantry, the office, the bathroom, the bedroom, all lockable from the outside. Even the fridge and the freezer had heavy, shiny padlocks on the doors. The front door had three locks. The only room that wasn’t locked was a second bedroom, which didn’t even have a door.

Christian shivered, walking past the room in question. It too was neat; the bed was made and covered with a light gray comforter, the closet had an assortment of methodically folded shirts, pants, a few sweaters and two jackets. There was another closet in the other bedroom, holding more clothes – they had already determined that they were slightly larger, and this spoke to the theory that two people had lived in the house.

Since Button had said there might be another person in the house, the SWAT team had done a thorough search. Doors had been broken down or flung open, any space large enough to conceal a person had been roughly searched, and they had scuffed floors and doorways everywhere. Still, they had found nobody. Not dead or alive. Before they had reached the basement there had been some doubt that they had even had the right person. But Jenson Button was dead and the local coroner had confirmed cyanide poisoning at a glance, and once they had gotten the door to the operating room opened, there was no doubt that they had been right.

The question remained however: who had been living with him? An accomplice? Someone had brought forth the theory that he’d had a child, but the clothes in the closet were not child-like and there were no toys, baby food, or typical children’s items. The next theory had been a captive of some sort, but other than the locks on the doors everywhere, there were no restraints, no signs of struggling, no evidence that Button had been keeping someone alive in his house. Then the techs had entered the crawl space and come back out with pictures of what could most closely be described as a nest. Three grubby sheets and a sleeping bag, bundled up as far away from the opening as one could get, and dirty, torn clothes hidden underneath them. It seemed to have been empty for a long time. Had there been two people besides Button in the house?

Christian glanced towards the door down to the basement. He didn’t want to go down there, not yet. Britta Roeske, the medical examiner heading up the CSI-team downstairs, was still processing everything down there. It was sterile, smelled strongly of bleach and iodine, well-lit and organized beyond belief. Drawers held surgical tools of all kinds, trays and clamps, scalpels and pliers. The larger drawers held saws. Roeske’s first assessment had been that any doctor would have been perfectly equipped and able to perform most life-saving surgeries in there. Christian was pretty sure no lives had ever been saved in that room, but he didn’t voice his thoughts.

Britta came up the stairs and into the hallway. She had a balled-up pair of vinyl gloves in one hand and her cellphone in the other. Christian kept his eyes on the master bedroom but listened in on Britta’s side of the conversation, which seemed to be ending.

“What’s going on?” he asked as soon as she flipped the phone shut. She sighed.

“We found two pairs of leather gloves down there,” she started. Christian nodded. He remembered them vividly. The picture had them laying side by side in the top drawer of the cabinet closest to the door. One pair of black, driving-style gloves with two red patches along the long- and index-fingers on the right hand, and one pair of white gloves, both seemingly stained with blood and cleaned several times.

“I cut a sample out of both – leather is useless for prints anyway, and what little DNA they found in the black pair matches the hairs in the master bedroom and the other samples, so we know that’s him.”

He knew she meant Button. They’d taken samples and prints as soon as he’d come in to the coroner’s office, and he was all over the house. They had however not found a single viable print in the operating room, at least not so far, and the techs had commented that even though they had found prints in the rest of the house the number was “strangely small”.

“What about the white pair?”

She seemed hesitant to answer, which usually meant she didn’t want to commit to whatever theory had come up just yet.

“It... well it matches the second bedroom, and... well it matches a few of the samples in the master bedroom too?”

Christian blinked.

“They were sleeping together? Are they related?”

“No relation what so ever.”

“So what are we saying here, he did have someone living with him who was in on the murders and staying in his bed? Are we talking about a couple, or a prisoner?”

“I can’t be sure, not yet,” Roeske said, sounding conflicted. “We’ve got no bodily fluids, no restraints, no... nothing. It’s too clean, I can’t process air.”

“Right,” Christian said, glancing to the bedroom again. Who the hell had been staying in there with an insane serial killer? He didn’t like to think it, but his first guess would have been ‘another insane serial killer’. The gloves seemed to confirm it; whoever it was had at the very least been aware of the murders.

“There’s something else,” Roeske said, glancing into the bedroom too, squeezing the little vinyl ball in her hand. “The prints from the second bedroom, what few we got... well the hairs match the gloves, and if we assume that it’s the same person as the prints... we can’t be sure yet but if we assume...”

“What?”

“They all belong to the same person, at least as far as we know for now.”

Christian bit the inside of his lip and let his thoughts run their course. If there had only been one other person here, an accomplice was more likely than a prisoner. Button was suspected of at least two murders, nearly two years apart. Why would he have kept a prisoner that whole time? No, it was more likely to have been an accomplice, a partner. Someone who had been trusted enough to have their own room and wander freely, if the absence of a door was anything to go by.

“I assume there hasn’t been any match in the system?”

“No,” Britta said.

“So how likely is it that it was Sebastian?”

She shrugged with a sigh. Her eyes kept going to the bed in the room and Christian knew she too was trying to imagine – or not imagine – what might have gone on in there.

“He was found _two years_ ago. This house is too clean, the traces could have been here for weeks, possibly even months.”

“But not years? Because then somebody else was here too, after Seb.”

“Christian,” she said, a note of tired resignation in her voice, “there’s no guarantee Button ever had him here. We don’t even know for sure that he killed him.”

“He said there was a boy here,” Christian said with determination. “That means he had an accomplice, someone knows what happened to Seb.”

“He also killed himself,” Britta said.

“Because he was desperate!”

“Or delusional. We have no idea what his mental state was like, there might _never_ have been any boy here.”

“The same car was seen hanging around when the Sorensen girl went missing and near where Sebastian was found.” Christian pointed toward the garage. “ _His_ car, and him killing himself before we had a chance to question him doesn’t exactly make him look _less_ guilty, does it?”

“No, fine,” Britta conceded, holding her hands up to stop him ranting on. Christian had been obsessive about the Vettel-case since he’d first heard of it, and once they had found a body which could be positively identified as Vettel, he’d turned that obsessiveness to finding the boy’s killer. “But there’s nothing to suggest Vettel was kept here then, and we have no conclusive proof that Button killed him! We have to follow the evidence.”

Christian looked like he was about to speak again and she forestalled him.

“And even if he was, we can’t tell if he was here a single night, or a week, or...” she looked around, the neatly made bed drawing her eye again. Everything they had gathered so far said Jenson Button had been a loner, a compulsively neat possible psychopath, an unsociable man who kept to himself and didn’t like people. “He just doesn’t seem the type to have an accomplice,” Britta finished.

“Sebastian was _here_ , I know it,” Christian said, turning to leave. Despite knowing he was heading back towards the exit, the house felt oppressive and frightening, like it might somehow trap him if he wasn’t careful. He spared a thought to what Roeske was heading back to down in the basement. He didn’t envy her one bit.


	3. The End

The suit felt tight around his neck and the fabric was so stiff it felt like it was forcing him to stand up straight. He tried to bend his back forward a little and straightened up again. Maybe that was why suits were what you wore to things like these. To help all the people stand up straight. Keep their heads up. It wasn’t helping for all of them. His grandmother was across the aisle in one of the benches, hunched over almost double, shaking from how much she was crying. His grandfather was bent over her, despite the suit.

Jenson didn’t cry. He had to be strong, had to sit up straight. He put his little hand on top of Father’s bigger one. He would be strong for the both of them. Father looked down at him. It had only taken a few days, but he had gotten so much older. His cloudy curls were grayer than before and the lines on his face were deeper now, especially around the eyes and mouth, and the lines that went from either side of his crooked nose down to his mouth looked like someone had carved them there with a knife.

The priest was still talking. Jenson couldn’t understand why. They all knew why they were there, there was no reason to tell them. He bent forward in his suit again and straightened his back. It was a little itchy, but he couldn’t let go of Father. Not now. He needed him.

Father’s hands had gotten worse than ever with the shaking. He would stop what he was doing and squeeze his fingers like he was cold, and Jenson knew it was because of his shaking hands. Jenson couldn’t see the flower in Father’s other hand, but he thought it must be shaking. He hoped it would go away when this was done. His own flower was steady, but it felt a little wet and prickly in his hand.

Father stood up, the priest had made a gesture to stand and Jenson had missed it. He hurriedly got off the bench and stood up too. Even the music that played was shaking a little, like it was crying too. Jenson steeled himself. Father had explained what they had to do now.

Slowly he walked up the aisle, Father behind him. His grandparents were looking at him but he didn’t look back, eyes forward, walk slowly, make sure to not trip on the carpet. There were candles here, and more flowers, two big circles of flowers as well as little bunches of them. He stepped forward and turned.

The wood was very shiny and the little metal bits around the handles glittered in the dancing candlelight. He put his flower down on top of the wood.

“Don’t worry mum. I’ll take care of Father,” he whispered. Father put his hand on his shoulder, a heavy, warm presence. Then he put his own flower down next to Jenson’s. He said something Jenson didn’t hear. It felt like he didn’t hear anything more all day, but something the priest said played over and over in his head until it was nothing but a dull buzzing, meaning nothing, but still everything he could think of.

“To dust, to dust, to dust, to dust, to dust...”


	4. Reasoning

Christian locked the door to his office and made his way down the hall. They had been at the Button house until late the previous night, so the morning meeting had been delayed for an hour – and he was still running a little late. The technicians had taken everything of interest already and the house had been under strict surveillance through the night. It would take at least another few days to go through everything. And as of yet there was no conclusive trace of Sebastian Vettel.

Christian sighed. He’d been so sure. Even after two years, he’d been so sure they’d finally find some irrefutable evidence that Button had been the one who killed Sebastian. He would finally have gotten an answer to what had happened during those three years when Sebastian had just been missing, he and his sister apparently leaving their home willingly late one evening, never to return. Even if he didn’t like to imagine what Button might have done with him, he wanted to know. The Vettels had only distant family left and when Christian had contacted them years ago, it had turned out most of them had never even met Sebastian. Regardless he’d kept the case going for five years: he wanted closure. With the few files detailing the investigation of the house so far in a folder under his arm, Christian got into the elevator.

“Christian!”

The door was just about to shut and he stopped it with both hands, dropping the folder. Otmar, his superior, hurried inside and took a little skip to avoid stepping on any papers.

“Thanks,” he said, sounding a little winded. Since becoming ‘Supervisory Special Agent Szafnauer’ he had spent an ever-increasing amount of time behind a desk rather than out in the field. His physique was an ongoing victim in this particular climb in his career. The doors closed and the elevator started moving while Christian gathered up his papers.

“So,” Otmar said, glancing at the files. “The Vettel-case. I heard your suspect committed suicide?”

“Yeah,” Christian said, straightening up. “Local law-enforcement wanted to move on the house quickly, in case Sorensen was still alive, and when they breached the house he... he poisoned himself.”

“Hm!”

“Yeah,” Christian nodded, understanding the tone of Otmar’s little exclamation. It was rare that people killed themselves, even to get out of facing serious charges for their crimes. Even more unusual was doing it by poison. “He’s at the local morgue, not that I think we’ll get any evidence out of him but...”

“So how sure are we that he’s actually the one who killed Vettel and kidnapped Sorensen? I mean if all you have to go on is the car...”

“You could join us for the huddle? We’re going to go through everything from last night before heading out again.”

Otmar shook his head with a polite smile.

“Sorry, I don’t have time for the morning meeting today,” he said pointedly. He’d never liked the informal jargon much. Their business was a serious one, and it was important to stay professional. “But keep me informed if you get anything. A closed case is a closed case, even if the guilty party can’t stand trial.”

 

“Sorry I’m late,” Christian said, closing the door to the meeting room and turning to face them. He froze. At the end of the table, Toto Wolff was flicking through a folder. He looked up, and then went back to his file, signaling to the whole room how little he cared that the lead agent had just walked in.

“I was just talking to Otmar,” Christian said, taking his seat at the head of the table and putting his files down. Since he’d dropped them they were out of order, and he started to sort through them.

“Right, have we got anything new since last night?”

“The lab sent the reports from the tests this morning,” Toto started.

“They sent those to _you_?” Christian said, unable to stop himself.

“Szafnauer seemed to think you need a second pair of eyes on the case,” Toto said smugly.

“We can discuss that later,” Christian interrupted, motioning for him to go on. He could argue with Toto and Otmar later, there was no need to go into it in front of the others. “What are the results?”

Toto flicked back two pages and pushed his glasses up.

“They are about the same as last night. The master bedroom has mainly one person’s DNA, the second bedroom has another, and they are the only two donors in the house.”

“What about the car?”

“Same two donors, but there are very few samples. The car was as clean as the rest of the house. They found a single hair between the seats in the back, a longer one, and that one matches Sorensen.”

“That’s really good, we can move forward on that.”

“Is there anything new from the witnesses?” Bonnington asked from the middle of the table.

“No,” Christian sighed. “The car was seen around the time and place Sebastian was later found dead, and another witness saw the car cruising the same area where Sorensen was probably picked up. Another witness confirmed the car is Button’s, and that a young man matching Sebastian’s description had been seen driving it.”

“Two years ago,” Toto added.

“Yes, more than two years ago.” Christian raised his voice. “Before Sebastian was found dead. Button took him, transported him across state lines, held him captive for god knows how long, and then disposed of him.” He took a deep breath to calm himself down. They were so close, and still they doubted.

 

\--

 

The case had been such a big part of Christian’s life for so long he had a hard time imagining life without it. He _needed_ to find Sebastian’s killer, to be the voice for a lost young man who had been taken far too soon. Unfortunately, the first part of the investigation left a lot to be desired. Local police had moved slowly, not followed up properly in Christian’s mind, and by the time there was any kind of development Sebastian had been missing for close to three years. That was when they found him dead.

Then the FBI had finally stepped in, and Christian had been allowed to start working properly. They had canvassed and searched for witnesses, but not until a year later, when the story ran again as part of a show about well-known missing persons-cases, had someone come forward. She had been certain she had seen Sebastian one night, driving the black car which was now sealed in plastic and waiting to be stripped down in search of any clue who else might have been in it. The witness had been unsure of the time however. Still, it was enough to make the case active again. Catching someone who had taken a minor held a higher priority than some missing kid who may or may not have run away all on his own.

Christian had never believed it though. Sebastian had been a decent student despite his somewhat chaotic homelife, and good kids didn’t just run away. His sister had become his legal guardian when their aunt had passed, and she had a steady job, they were both doing their best. It was believed that they had simply been out on an errand, as the home showed no signs of them being about to move. Christian had never been to the Vettels’s apartment, but he had reviewed the pictures from the local police so many times he could have found his way around it without problem if he ever ended up there.

Sebastian had been found in a creek on the road leading into town. The working theory was that he’d been walking along the shoulder and been hit by a car, tumbling down the bank into the creek. The driver hadn’t left any trace other than broken tibias and a dead body, slowly assaulted by the elements, by water, cold, and animals, until it had been spotted by a trucker stopping nearby to take a leak. By then the body hardly looked like the pictures Christian had seen so many times that he would sometimes swear he saw Sebastian while he was out working other cases. But the dirty blond, just slightly curled hair and the estimated height and weight were right. His high school basketball cap with the gold number 5 on the side was found nearby. Face down in the creek, broken and alone. It wasn’t at all how Christian had wanted to finally meet Sebastian Vettel.

 

\--

 

The huddle kept going, running through the notes and files, slowly adding piece by piece to the puzzle that was Button’s house and life. He had inherited the house from his mother’s second husband, a retired veterinarian named Alain. It was a little out of the way but housing developments had been moving closer to the area in the past few years. As far as they’d been able to tell, Button had gone to the nearest possible university and then taken a job as an archivist in the local courthouse. Apart from a single speeding ticket more than a year earlier, he didn’t exist in the system. He was an absolute nobody.

They kept sorting through the material, adding it to different piles according to which agents would handle it. Bonnington and his guys would take the canvas, trying to find out more about Button from his colleagues, trying to map his movements. Cyril’s technicians had already returned to the house, and Cyril promised to have more information by the afternoon huddle regarding evidence and trace.

“Britta’s late,” Toto commented when Christian had gone over everyone’s continued assignments and deliberately skipped any questions for the medical examiner.

“Well she’s probably...” Christian started, but was interrupted by the door being yanked open.

Britta looked terrible. Her hair was messy, like she’d been running her hands through it and continuously adjusting her ponytail. She looked pale, but still a little flush – something had her in a right state.

“Britta, what..?”

“I need you to come with me,” she said through gritted teeth. “I’ll be in for the afternoon huddle but right now I need you to come with me, right away.” She was ignoring everyone else in the room and looking straight at Christian. There was a rage blazing in her eyes like he had never seen before.

“Alright, eh...” Christian said, starting to gather his files. “Everybody head out, and... we’ll reconvene at four.”

They all left, giving Britta a wide berth as they passed her. She nodded at them, still with her teeth pressed together hard. When Toto had finally left, she closed the door behind him with a snap.

“These fucking idiots,” she hissed out. Christian just stared. He’d never heard her sound so angry. “These backwoods fucking idiots!”

“Britta what’s happened?” Instinctively he reached out his hand to touch her shoulder, but before he could, she struck out her arms.

“They’ve lost the fucking body!”

“What..?” Christian didn’t understand. Britta started pacing with short, snapping steps.

“Button’s body, they were supposed to store it at the morgue at the hospital until I came for it, but when I got there it was gone.”

“Gone?!”

“I’ve been chasing it all morning. It’s... gone. Missing.”

Christian didn’t know what to say. He stared, his mouth hanging open, watching as Britta’s anger deflated into a defeated expression. He hadn’t had great hopes toward finding anything of evidentiary value on Button’s body, but now it was gone. His most tangible connection to Sebastian Vettel was gone.


	5. The Bright Boy

Jenson had learned to read and write early on, and his new teacher had said he was “bright”. When he was younger he had thought about that. Bright. Father was a smart man, and he owned a lot of books. When you read books, you got smarter. And to read, you needed light. Everything important happened with the lights on: you could read, and write, and get smarter. There was a light in the fridge so you could see the food hadn’t gone bad. When he wrote out the notes for Father’s research, he got to sit at the big desk in the office, and Father turned on the desk lamp for him. It was important work. It made them both smarter. The new house had a very bright room downstairs, in the basement. That was where the most important things happened. It was the brightest room of all.

Father’s job was in a bright place, called a “practice”. He worked helping animals, but had wanted to help humans too. Most humans weren’t very bright though. There was nothing perfect in the world, really. Humans weren’t too bright on the inside, and animals were dirty on the outside. Animals were usually nice to you if you were nice to them, however. A lot of humans hadn’t understood that. Sometimes, Father had to put the animals to sleep, if they were badly hurt or very old. It was just how things happened. From the day things were born, they started to die. The animals seemed to understand this, even in their last moments before they went back to dust. Jenson understood it. But he was bright. He understood things other kids didn’t.

His grandparents had wanted them to stay in the city, but Father had wanted them to move. He said that just like people who didn’t take their shoes off and didn’t wash their hands dragged dirt around the house, people also came with bad thinking, bad ideas, and they would stick around too. So they had moved to the big house. It was bigger than their last one, and further away from the city, so every day Father would drive him to school before he went to his “practice”. Father started early, so every day Jenson would have some time to himself in the playground outside the school. He liked that time to sit and think, before the other kids all arrived and it became loud and dim. He was getting very good at tuning them out, forgetting about them.

 

When he was nine years old he got a gold star for writing on his report card. His lettering was very neat, his teacher said. Jenson was very happy with his gold star. It was proof that all the work paid off. He took Father’s notes very carefully, and had learned to read even the shakiest letters and numbers. If you worked at something, you got rewards. He showed Father his gold star, and Father patted him on the head with a smile.

“That is very good Jenson,” he said. “Maybe it’s time I show you how you can help me with something else?”

Jenson nodded eagerly. He was a very good boy. He helped with a lot of things. Everyone had to help out; at home he cleaned his room and kept the rest of the house tidy, and he took Father’s notes, filing them carefully with dates in the brown folders, putting away the subject cards in the card holder. If he didn’t do his part, Father had to do it for him, and that meant he wouldn’t have time to do other things. If time had to be spent doing or re-doing Jenson’s tasks, it meant less time for nice things, like listening to the news on the radio or having a cooked dinner. He hated screwing it up, because then he had to sleep hungry. Or they would only have time for those biscuits with the little seeds that always got stuck in his teeth. On those nights he would stand on the little stool in the bathroom, glaring at himself in the mirror and angrily brushing his teeth hard, hard and fast until the gums bled. It was easiest if everyone just did their part. Then things flowed smoothly, as they were supposed to.

 

He got another gold star on his report card for his neat writing when he was ten years old. He showed it to Father with the same feeling of pride as last time, and Father patted him on the head again. The work was harder now, but he was doing so well. Now he could take Father’s notes in the bright room while Father spoke, which freed Father from having to write altogether. It had been a time-consuming process and Father was very happy for his help, so that he could focus on his important work. The notes were important too, but without the research, there would be nothing to take notes on. Research led to more knowledge, to science moving forward, to learning things.

By the time he and Father went down to the bright room again, Jenson had cleaned up all of Father’s old notes and filed them in the cabinet by date. The old copies had been disposed of carefully, shredded and burned in a little hole he had dug in the back yard. He had re-placed the tuft of grass once the fire was out and all that remained were ashes and dust. Nature would take care of the rest. Father hadn’t been able to see the hole from the window, and had been pleased.

Jenson liked helping with the research, but he was happy that he could sit off to the side, most of the time. He didn’t fear the corpses, the subjects, but the way their eyes rolled made him feel uncomfortable. They were unreadable. It was from the injections, the little shot Father gave them to keep them soft and silent. Sometimes he helped Father with the straps that held the corpses in place while he cut.

It was a woman this time, with long black hair, already flecked with gray at the temples. Her head was back and her eyes weren’t seeing the room anymore, like people looked when they had been drinking or taking drugs, he had seen those people in the city. As if there was more proof needed that some things made the decay work faster; those people looked dead already, ready to be disposed of, but they were allowed to walk around and spread the decay. Some people just didn’t understand. This woman didn’t try to speak, just made noises, like all the corpses. Gasses and fluids were escaping and moving around inside the body, finally coming to a stop. Back to dust.

He took notes as Father spoke, as he cut and weighed and described. All neat, all in order. Bit by bit, until they were finished. Father took off his gloves and washed his hands before using a small towel to wipe his brow.

“You can clean up in here, can’t you Jenson?” he said. Jenson nodded, closing his book. Usually Father stayed to supervise. He was being trusted to do it himself, and he would do it perfectly.

The corpse was completely still now, but very messy. Jenson put on his bright room-raincoat and his gloves and set to work. The soft bits in one place, the hard bits in another. All the blood drained from the table into the floor drain, then he cleaned the table off with the bleach. Even with the protective mask on it stung his nose, but it made everything nice and shiny again. The iodine he used in the beginning smelled worse, but he only needed that for the cut bits, once he had given them a little rinse with the hand-shower at the sink. You had to be careful with the iodine, the color stuck to the skin and made it orange. He changed gloves beforehand, just to be sure.

Three pairs of gloves later he put the cover on the sink and reached up to push the button to start the garbage disposal. It rattled and gurgled, grinding up all the soft bits, the parts that would decay. The bigger pieces and hard bits would need more time in the fluids. Different fluids for different bits. He measured and poured into the plastic vats, carefully sealing all the lids and the plastic tubes that led the smell away from the room. The small vats would be done first, ready to go down the drain when the pieces were nothing but gravel and dust. The bigger pieces would stay in the vats for a little while. When he was done he threw his gloves away and put the raincoat in a bag, washed his hands and his face and wiped down the counter carefully before putting the towel in the little hamper with the lid that flew open when you stepped on a pedal at the bottom of it.

When he got upstairs he went straight to the bathroom and washed his hands again, all the way up his arms. He washed his face again too, and dried off carefully. He was done well before dinner, and immediately set to work chopping onions. Father finished reading the newspaper not long after and came in to see how he was doing.

“I will cut the chicken, and you can do the rest of the vegetables,” Father said, putting two carrots and a bit of celery on the counter in front of Jenson, who made a face.

“Hey,” Father said, and Jenson put the knife down, looking at the floor. He’d done wrong, he knew it already. “Why don’t you ever turn your nose up at food?”

“Because it’s bad manners,” Jenson said in a low voice. “I’m sorry, Father.”

Father looked at him a little while longer, but then seemed to think that would do. Jenson certainly thought so, his cheeks were hot and he had already promised himself to work harder at not being ungrateful about the food. He just really, really hated celery.


	6. Erratum

A clerical error. Christian could hardly believe it. When they finally unraveled everything that had happened in the few hours from when Jenson Button had died up to lunchtime the next day, the answers left him completely dumbstruck. A clerical error. That was the reason that instead of a body, which could at least have been searched for evidence, he now had a box of ashes with a name on the front. At least the name was correct, he thought sardonically.

The local authorities had had their own coroner look at the body before it had been put in a body bag and taken away. As Britta had only been part of the CSI team and the local police had gone over the heads of the FBI when breaching the house, it had taken an hour or so before she could order the body to be marked for her, meaning it would be kept without further procedure until she could handle it personally. In most cases this was completely routine and in no way a problem.

Only the hospital morgue had no record of receiving Button’s body at all. No body with any kind of police notice had come in, as far as they knew. That morning however, three bodies had been scheduled for cremation. One of them had been Jenson Button, and the technicians had checked him off on their list and handled the body accordingly.

 

“That’s it,” Christian prefaced the emergency huddle once he’d gotten everyone in the same place again. They were standing in the garden in front of the Button house, the sun hiding behind heavy gray clouds and the police tape on the patio trembling in the wind. It was cold, and Christian couldn’t stop himself glancing up at the oppressive building where he was sure at least two people had lost their lives.

“As of right now, we’re not cooperating with the locals anymore. They’re handing over their files, and we’ll take the case fully from here. I’ve called for reinforcements to take over the investigation of the house. Britta will stay on the...” he looked around. He was used to there being some attention when the police rolled out en masse and a house was searched. Nobody had turned up to the Button house. “... the basement,” he finished. He was always cautious about press.

“Bono will take care of the background, I want to know what’s happened to this house and when,” Toto said, pointing to Peter Bonnington, who nodded. “Maybe we can find out when the room was built, if we can find bills for supplies.”

“Right,” Christian said, taking the word back, “Cyril, you and your guys stay on the office. As soon as the other field agents arrive, I want them to go over the house from top to bottom. Any samples go to our own lab, unless it’s absolutely urgent.”

They concluded the huddle, and when everyone left, Toto stayed behind.

“I don’t appreciate you coming in and trying to take over,” Christian muttered. Toto glanced at him and pushed his glasses further up on his nose.

“I am not trying to _take over_ , I’m here to help. Otmar...”

“Otmar knows I can handle my job.”

“Otmar thinks you are a little too attached to the Vettel-case, and he wants to make sure everything is handled in the best way possible,” Toto said slowly, smiling. “Like I said: I’m here to help.”

He walked off, disappearing into the house. Christian remained in the yard. It all looked so ordinary from the outside. The garden was simple and small, just a drive up to the garage and a walkway to the front door, a little bit of lawn and a single, pretty big tree. The morning paper had arrived in the mailbox some time before they got there. Around the house where Christian was sure Sebastian had been held, the world went about its business as usual. In fact, as far as he knew, Button’s colleagues were the only ones currently wondering where he might be.

 

Not even an hour later, Cyril called for Christian to come into the office. The team had already moved the filing cabinets out and started going through the files; Button apparently worked from home sometimes. The cabinets were all locked however and when Cyril called to check with his office, it turned out it was all in order. Button had permission to work in his home office as long as his files were correctly stored. The filing cabinets weren’t what had drawn Cyril’s attention however.

When they had tried to remove a frame containing a certificate for Button’s stepfather ‘Doctor Prost’, they had realized there were hinges on the side of it. When swung forward, it revealed a safe. It had taken them a long time to locate someone nearby who could open it and by the time he had arrived, Britta had come upstairs balling up yet another pair of vinyl gloves, stating that they had now started taking the pipes apart to look for traces of blood.

Christian didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but at first glance, the contents of the safe were wholly anticlimactic. It was a brown, pricy looking ring binder, and a box. Preparing a clean area on the desk, Cyril carefully lifted the binder out, keeping it level and setting it down softly. He checked the edges of the binder while Britta, having donned another set of gloves, raised the box and, holding it steady between her hands, transferred it to the desk as well. Another field agent photographed both items.

“Do you want to wait so we can check for explosives?” Toto asked, having come in from the kitchen.

“It struck me that they might be poisoned, actually,” Christian said, not taking his eyes off the box for a second. “But it doesn’t seem like this was for anyone but him, so I think it’s safe.”

Cyril glanced between his two superiors. They didn’t often argue openly but one would have to be really bad at reading people to miss the undercurrent of hostility. Toto was good at sniffing out prestige cases and it was pretty well-known that Christian had a certain devotion to the Vettel-case, but he couldn’t see quite why they would be at odds over this. He looked over to the technician with the camera, who nodded, ready to go. Slowly, Cyril lifted the front cover.

It looked like a form. It was hand-written in pen, starting with a short paragraph and followed by a series of numbers. From where he was standing Christian couldn’t read it.

“Prost was a veterinarian, wasn’t he?” Toto asked. His eyebrows were knitted and he looked as puzzled by this as everybody else. Christian nodded. “Maybe he took his work home with him, you know, saved old case files?” Toto suggested.

Cyril kept turning the pages, but they all looked pretty much the same. The technicians would look at them more closely later, but the first-glance examination might grant something that would help in the now.

Meanwhile Britta eased the lid off of the box. Christian recognized it as the kind of box used in offices to organize business cards. He wasn’t expecting anything more than contact information, either to people Button would have met in his work at the court house or to most likely long-since-dead veterinary colleagues of Prost’s.

It was driver’s licenses.

Christian’s first guess would be that there were somewhere between thirty and fifty little plastic cards in the box. Britta looked confused. Toto pushed his glasses up. The technician snapped a few pictures.

“Fake identities?” Toto suggested.

“This is a woman though,” Britta said, carefully picking up the card at the front, only touching the edges. Then she gasped. With a shocked look she held the card up so Christian and Toto could see it.

Smiling happily at them from the little plastic card, her blonde hair tucked behind her ears, was Veronica Sorensen.


	7. The First

At 16, Jenson was already taller than Father. He could easily reach all the top shelves and no longer needed the little stepping stool to see himself in the mirror in the bathroom. The stool wasn’t needed in the basement either. Jenson had instead pulled up one of the tall cabinets to the left side of the table. He could take notes on it while he studied the craft, sometimes helping Father with tools or whatever he needed. Father’s hands still trembled and he had been getting worse, but he didn’t seem too concerned.

“We all die,” Father said one night when they were going over old subjects. “From the time we’re born, we’re all dying. There is nothing to fear about it.”

At a parent-teacher meeting, Jenson’s homeroom teacher told Father that Jenson’s homework was usually immaculate, and he did great in exams, but he hardly ever raised his hands or participated actively in class. In group projects he also tended to be quiet, but still pull his own weight. Father had smiled politely and explained that Jenson had always been a shy boy.

In truth Jenson wasn’t very shy, he simply felt no need to interact with the other students. Much like when he had been a child, they all just seemed noisy. Their purpose lay only in what could be learned from them before they returned to dust. And one learned first by listening and watching, and then perfected the knowledge by doing.

 

Father already trusted Jenson with most acquisitions when he said it was finally time. He left Jenson to prepare the bright room on his own, and went to retrieve the subject. Jenson put on his leather driving gloves; they weren’t medical, but they made him comfortable, and Father indulged him in the practice saying that most professionals had some kind of good luck charm. For the first time in a long time, Jenson felt nervousness along with the excitement. He hoped he could make Father proud.

It was a female in her mid-twenties with shoulder-length, dark blonde hair. Father had already given her the shot and she was heavy and pliable, hardly moving on her own while Jenson tightened the straps, securing the body on the table. She barely made a sound, only the usual noises of air escaping the lungs, sometimes making vocal chords quiver as if the corpse still held life. All part of the natural process.

Jenson looked up, and Father gave him a nod. He wasn’t going to guide him. It was time for Jenson to prove himself.

He took the scissors and cut away the clothes, pulling them free from under the straps and leaving bare skin. The first thing to do was always to examine the corpse’s outward appearance. Any deformity or defect, or signs of disease, would render the subject useless for research.

When he pulled the shirt aside he stopped. Above the right hip there was an angry red line, lined on either side by six little dots. Another doctor had already handled the corpse.

“Father?” Jenson asked hesitantly.

“What do you think has happened there?” Father asked, still standing back and looking on with a serene smile.

“The appendix,” Jenson said, putting the scissors on the tray. “If the corpse is damaged...”

“Just this once, we can ignore it. You know what the appendix would look like?”

Jenson nodded, visualizing the inside, the intestines, and a healthy appendix.

“Good. Work on as usual. We will dispose of this one without cleaning, and in the notes we put...” he waited for Jenson to run down the work order.

“Subject unviable due to perceptible medical influence of unknown practitioner.”

Father nodded, looking pleased.

“Very good. Now you can see what another’s work looks like. Go ahead and open it up.”

 

Jenson first explored the surgical scar and then Father asked him to demonstrate a basic incision. He performed it flawlessly. Since the subject wasn’t viable, Father then told him to clean up. He would expect Jenson to perform the next autopsy as well, and Jenson agreed. It had been good practice though. Father turned and left. He got tired easily these days, and the research was going slowly because of it. Jenson knew he would have to take over soon.

He looked at the body. Normally, the process was to leave the corpse in the straps and cut the femoral and jugular veins, waiting for the body to drain, and then package the corpse and return it to nature. Nobody could gain anything from finding the failed subjects anyway. He looked at the closed door. Father was already upstairs. He looked at the body again. Then he slowly reached out his hands.

 

Later, when they got back from disposal, he analyzed his actions alone in his room. He surmised that he had simply wanted to feel what it felt like, the realization of the end when the corpse finally deceased and decay could take its proper course. Teenage curiosity. He hadn’t particularly liked it.


	8. Breakdown

Christian flipped the pages of the latest reports back and forward a couple of times, trying to make sense of it all. The agents doing interviews had turned up absolutely nothing. They already had all the legal documentation they could possibly get, and Christian had thought the personal interviews would give _something_ , but no. Apart from being a little standoffish, Jenson was perfectly normal. His colleagues liked him well enough, but all of them had quickly concluded that the quiet, reserved man did his best work when simply left alone. One of them voiced the theory that Button had been “a gay”, since he had never married and they had never seen him with a girlfriend. Another thought he might have a fear of bacteria, or have OCD, which she had seen a show about on television once.

So apart from having been a potential serial killer, Jenson Button was so normal it was almost abnormal. And “potential” was becoming the operative word. The traces of blood from the operating room were so diluted they were unusable. They had found a few more hairs in the car, but all that proved was that someone other than Button had been there at all – for all they knew it could be transfer, or he had given someone a ride.

The papers in the brown binder had been fingerprinted and copied. They all had a similar format at first glance, all except the last page. It was a numbered list of dates, spaced by seven days. Once a week, Button had made a note of something, and counting back it looked like there were almost two years’ worth of notations. After each date there were numbers, fluctuating up and down between 1.20 at lowest and 4.13 at most. Some dates were missing numbers and instead said “NE”. The only exception was the second date, which said “no emission”. They thought it might have had to do with some kind of medication, but there was nothing in the house or in Button’s medical records to suggest he’d been on any kind of drugs.

Britta had been going through the driver’s licenses, which were still their strongest pieces of evidence so far. Veronica Sorensen’s license in Button’s house, after his car had been seen in the area where she had last been seen, was damning. Still, it wasn’t conclusive. And there was no license from Sebastian Vettel. It was the first thing Christian had checked.

 

He had taken the first part of the task for himself, laying the licenses out one by one, photographing and fingerprinting them all, making a list of their names and ages. Until the very last one he still held on to the fearful hope that the last one would be Sebastian’s. But it hadn’t been. It was a woman whose license had expired more than twenty years earlier.

“Twenty years?” Toto had said when he came in to check how things were going. “He would have been a teenager back then.”

“Some start early,” Christian grumbled. Over the past two weeks Toto had been getting on his nerves worse and worse, culminating in him calling Christian ‘obsessive’ in front of the whole team. The discovery of Sorensen’s license had held up the comments a little bit, but now Toto was back in full force.

“But it is completely insane to think he would have killed someone at such a young age, just because you want to think this man killed Vettel!”

Christian slammed his hand down on the table.

“I know he fucking killed Sebastian!”

“No, you like to _think_ he did!” Toto shot back, matching him in volume. “You took the thinnest little shred of evidence, a witness seeing a car, _a car_ , two years ago, and the only reason they allowed you to move forward was because Vettel’s body was over state lines!”

“I’m not wrong about Jenson Button!”

Toto laughed, a single, scornful laugh, throwing his arms out.

“No, I suppose to fit your theories he started murdering in his early teens.”

“And what do _you_ think happened then?” Christian spat harshly. “It’s random? He’s a driver’s license collector?”

“Well his stepfather was a veterinarian...” Toto said, and it was Christian’s turn to scoff.

“Oh yes, of _course_ , his stepfather was a serial killer and taught him everything he knew! That’s about as likely as Button or any of these people coming back from the fucking dead!”

Toto shook his head with a pitying look.

“You’re too attached to this case, Christian. I don’t know what we have here, but... it’s all circumstance. The car is your only connection to Vettel, and it’s weak. Weak at best.”

He walked around the table and tapped his finger against the stack of photos of driver’s licenses.

“This is evidence, Christian. Something happened here. But the Vettel-boy is not in this pile. Maybe he met Button at some point, and maybe he didn’t. But there is no evidence either way. All we know is that Sebastian is dead. Your hunch led us to a possible serial and that is much more important than _one_ boy. Focus on the evidence, Christian.”

Christian glared up at him.

“I know he had Seb,” he said quietly. He wanted Toto to leave. There had to be a clue somewhere that would lead him to Seb, to what had happened.


	9. The Last

Jenson was 25 when the end finally came. Decay had overtaken Father, made him wispy and gray, insubstantial as smoke. The man who had always been at Jenson’s side was stuck in a bed, his curly hair lank and lifeless, his skin stretching over his now-thin face and the crooked nose, his body longing to return to dust. His last two weeks were spent in a hospital room which smelled pleasantly clean, and Jenson came to visit him every day. At this point it was all just waiting.

“Remember that you have my recommendation, my boy,” Father said, his voice as thin as his body. Jenson bowed his head.

“Thank you, Father.”

The last year Father had spent at home had been stressful. His tremors were so bad he couldn’t take care of himself anymore, and Jenson was visited by a stress-related headache at having to try to handle everything. The research fell behind, but it could wait.

“Father, when you’re gone...”

Father squeezed his hand a little tighter, smiling a tired smile.

“I know, and it’s fine. I was unsuccessful in my own research, and I know you’ll want to go down your own path with it.” He started coughing and Jenson held his hand, now almost smaller than his own, waiting for it to subside before offering him a sip of water from the glass on the desk.

“That’s the way it is with science... and most of all with young men.” He winked. “You’ll go far on your own path, Jenson. I know it.”

 

That night, Jenson cried for the first time he could remember since becoming an adult. While he and Father both knew very well that they were dying, it didn’t make actually saying goodbye any easier. He’d stayed calm at the hospital, explaining the plans that had already been made. Father was to be placed next to mum, the ceremony held in the same church as the last funeral he had attended. He would wear a suit and sit up straight, and be strong. Now he had only himself to take care of, until decay would take him to.

In the end, everyone returned to dust. All that remained was doing what you were meant to do in the meantime. With Father’s blessing, the work would continue as before.


	10. Breakthrough

Britta had called in a few favors with her colleagues and gotten through the list of driver’s licenses in record time. She had started with 42 names, and had already crossed off most of them. By “crossed off”, however, she only meant that she had some kind of response to the question of what had happened. Button had somehow acquired the driver’s licenses of a lot of people who, by all accounts, were missing without a trace.

Some of them however, she could confirm as dead. They were spread out over both time and distance, but at least there was confirmation. Most of them had been outdoors for some length of time, and all of them were too damaged by the elements and animals and the like to determine any kind of cause of death. Britta ordered up every case file she could find.

She’d also put Stefania to work trying to figure out what ‘the forms’, as they had come to be known, were about. The texts were very similar, all containing the same type of shorthand notes, suggesting the same person had written it all. There was however a clear development in the writing – the first few pages were carefully, meticulously written, while the last ones had been written by a more quick, relaxed hand.

It had taken a few days to work through it all. Britta had long since given up on any meetings with the whole team, only attending the morning huddles when she absolutely had to. Otmar was a permanent fixture at the table, a silent sentinel there to keep the peace between Toto and Christian. Britta preferred smaller group meetings and conversations as a mode of investigation. Collective thinking, that was the way, she thought.

One of the biggest breakthroughs in the case just happened to come one morning when Britta and Stefania sat down together to go through their collective findings.

 

Britta made her way around the table and started looking at the row of forms.

“So... if these are forms, then these numbers mean the same things,” she said, looking at the list of numbers on the file. “I mean they’re all pretty close, looking at them row by row?”

“Do you have a pen?” Stefania asked suddenly.

Britta handed her a pen and watched as Stefania laid a handful of the copied forms out next to each other, circling one of the numbers listed. She then looked at the next form, and circled the numbers on the same row.

“It does look like they’re the same, but look, every three or four... it’s different?” she said, circling yet another form. It was undoubtedly a pattern.

 

Britta looked at the photographs of the driver’s licenses one after another. There were certainly no patterns there. Men and women, varying ages and races. Then a thought struck her.

“This description...” she said, running her finger down the copy of the form Stefania had just circled, “could be this man?” She pointed to one of the photographs of the driver’s licenses. They still hadn’t worked out what the numbers meant, but the short descriptive text, reading “male, brown hair, blue eyes, several nevi above eye. No defect.” was quite easy to understand.

Britta looked at the picture. Then she slapped her hand against her forehead.

“I didn’t even think of it, I’ve been so focused on these reports... ‘nevi above eye’, it’s the birthmarks!”

The man in the picture had several birthmarks above his eye, plainly visible on the driver’s license photo.

“It’s an old way of putting it though, and as far as I can tell Button didn’t have any background in medicine...” she continued, remembering the aging professor who had referred to moles and birthmarks by the older term ‘nevus’ when she was going through med school.

“His stepdad was a veterinarian,” Stefania said absently, looking at the next file, and then back to the one before.

“Are you going over to Toto’s side then?” Britta said, smiling in spite of herself.

“No...” she said absently. “I wish he’d left instructions, this is ridiculous.”

“What’s the next description?”

“Female, black hair, brown eyes. No defect. I have no idea what this ‘no defect’ means, it sounds so... detached.”

“Yeah,” Britta said, holding on to the license that had been next in her pile. The description didn’t match.

“Male, blond, blue eyes?” Stefania tried.

“Yes. Male, blond, blue eyes,” Britta said, putting the license above the file Stefania had been reading from.

Stefania looked up slowly, then made a grab for the stack of pictures Britta was holding. Soon enough they had placed all the licenses by their respective forms. It was a far cry from putting faces with all of them, but it was something, and they both stood in silence looking at the eerie story it told.

“So the dates,” Stefania said, breaking the silence. “We think that is when he killed them? But like Toto said, he... over here.” She pointed to one of the files, with a license above it. A young girl with a dark-blonde bob-cut looked back at them. “He can’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen here?”

 

“And this row, we thought it had to do with animals... it doesn’t appear until the twelfth form.” Britta followed the text with her finger as she read out loud. “Subject unviable due to medical influence of unknown practitioner.”

She looked at Stefania.

“What does that even mean? Unviable for _what_?”

Stefania shrugged.

“It comes back here and here,” Britta said, pointing. “Here it’s been shortened,” she said, putting to the driver’s license of the bob-cut girl again. The file was shorter than the others. At the bottom it said “Subject unviable, med, UP.”.

“There’s another difference here,” Stefania said, coming over to look at the file. “The ones on either side say ‘no defect’ but that one doesn’t?” She put a question mark on the

Britta sat back down on her chair and looked at all the files and licenses. The first, chilling thought had already come and gone. They had to accept that quite possibly all these people were dead, seeing as how they were all missing. They also had to work on the premise that Button was possibly responsible for all of their deaths. But to think that he would have, for some reason, taken notes on them...

“And if these are dates... there’s a gap of over a year here.” She tapped her finger on the table between two forms.

“What happened there?” Stefania asked. Britta found the sheet Peter had prepared with the timeline of Jenson’s life, as far as they knew it.

“His stepfather died.”

Both the women looked at each other. There were almost an equal number of forms on either side of the gap.


	11. The Nuisance

Jenson unlocked the fridge and put away the tartar sauce. Fish was beneficial for the brain, so he made sure to eat it once a week. He put his plate in the kitchen sink and considered scraping the leftovers into the trash, but didn’t. Half a potato and what was left of the fish should be more than enough for the brat. He went into the living room to watch the news before going to bed.

Tonight the brat didn’t wait until he’d gone to his bedroom. Usually he’d hear the soft footsteps about half an hour after he closed his own door, now he heard the slight creak of the floor in the doorway to the kitchen as soon as the news reader had appeared on the screen and started running down the headlines.

When the news were over he was about to get up, until the opening of the next show started. It was about missing persons, and one of the pictures that flashed by had caught his eye. It was a school photograph against the classic sky-with-clouds backdrop. A smiling boy, maybe 14 or so, with dark blond hair going every which way. He had big, bright blue eyes, and Jenson stared. The brat didn’t look like that anymore. How long had it actually been?

The presenter started with some kind of routine introduction, but Jenson barely listened. There was no noise from the kitchen. All animals could be trained, he thought. The brat was probably already done, not daring to make a sound while foraging after being taught to be quiet. Good.

Then he was back on TV. Sebastian. Decent grades, played on the school basketball team, tragic homelife with his older sister assuming guardianship after their aunt had died. He had disappeared at 14, and the presenter lamented that it was now close to his eighteenth birthday, and there was still not a trace of Sebastian Vettel. But the case was still open and investigations ongoing.

‘Ongoing’ wasn’t good.

He turned off the TV and remained seated on the couch for a while, thinking hard. He would have to get rid of him. The brat was eating things from the trash. He wasn’t clean. Jenson had invited decay into his house, brought it in with a corpse and not cleaned up after himself. A part of him wanted to go to the cubbyhole where he knew the brat was hiding and get rid of him as soon as possible. Then he thought about it a little further.

If he could get the police off the boy’s trail first, it would be safe to dispose of him later.

 

It took him a few weeks to find the boy, but as luck would have it he’d spotted a hitchhiker with a reasonable likeness to the brat at a fair distance from home. The boy was just like the brat; blond and young and disgusting, covered in dust from the road and utterly loutish. Jenson treated him as an adult, keeping his revulsion down. Soon the boy was speaking freely about this and that. Trusting.

Offering him water laced with heavy diuretics soon meant the boy asked to be let out to relieve himself. Jenson drove up the road toward the creek and said he would wait a little ways away, keeping the lights on. The boy wanted to relieve himself into the creek, thinking it funny to assert himself in such a way. He turned from the car just a bit so Jenson wouldn’t see him exposed, despite the distance. Jenson’s leather gloves creaked as he gripped the steering wheel tightly and hit the gas.

The noise wasn’t what he’d expected. It was dull, a thunk, no crunch or pop even though Jenson could clearly see that both the boy’s legs had been broken. He was on the ground, wailing like an injured animal. They were far enough from anything and anyone else that the sound wouldn’t bring any attention. Jenson took hold of the back of the boy’s pants and his jacket and dragged him a little further away from the car. When he got to the edge he let go of the jacket, causing the boy’s head to hit the asphalt hard. Then he threw him over the edge.

The countryside was pretty nice at night, Jenson decided, looking up at the stars. The noises from all around – the wind in the leaves, the water in the creek bubbling past, and a few frogs and birds calling – continued. The sobs and whimpers from below subsided, fading away into the night. Jenson took the cap he had taken from the brat when he arrived out of the glove compartment and threw it down into the darkness. He felt uneasy.

When he got home his heart was beating fast and he was nervous. The feeling made him even more uneasy. Disposing of completely unviable corpses was, for all intents and purposes, an act of mercy. But it was disorganized and needless. He didn’t like it.

 

Shortly after that, he noticed the boy for the first time in a long time, stealing food again. At eighteen, it was time for him to become an adult, to start contributing, both to the household and to the work. If he could be taught to be quiet, he could be taught to do research, Jenson thought. All the little slut needed was someone to help him. Yes, that prospect felt quite exciting. Not pointless, sloppy attacks like he had tried from time to time, when Jenson had to correct him. No, focus and discipline. Proper behavior.

 

\--

 

A few months later, Jenson had come home from work with a terrible headache, and rather than getting started on dinner he went to bed to lie down. He had thought ruefully that there might only be time for a few biscuits before bed once the headache cleared, but it was so bad he couldn’t imagine doing kitchen chores. Sebastian was already his assistant but still sneaked around the house, staying close to the walls like he’d still rather be inside them. Despite being cleaned and clothed, he sought out the decay.

With his arm over his eyes and the headache buzzing in his ears, Jenson almost missed when the water in the kitchen turned on. The brat – Sebastian, he corrected himself – had been given more liberties, but what was he up to now?

“Uhm... Jense?” he spoke quietly, soft as he could. If he had come to check if Jenson was open to attack, Jenson would have to hurt him. He moved his arm aside and glanced at the boy.

He had already started filling out, looking healthier. Decay could be fought, and here sat the proof. His hair was cleaned and shorter than before, especially on the sides, it looked neat and didn’t allow for pests to take hold. He had gotten better at shaving his face too. He learned quickly, in most things.

“Do... would you like some water?” he said, indicating a glass he’d put on the nightstand so quietly Jenson had entirely missed it.

“Thank you,” Jenson said, and Sebastian held out the glass, waited for him to take it and drink, and then put it back.

“I... I can’t have the key, right? You won’t give me the key to the kitchen?”

He was asking hesitantly, already knowing the answer. If the headache hadn’t been so bad, Jenson would have been very angry. The boy would have had to be punished for thinking such things. He glared.

“Then let me help a little,” Sebastian said, taking out a wet towel. Jenson recognized it as the hand towel from the bathroom. Slowly, as if approaching a feral animal, he reached forward with the towel, and when Jenson didn’t strike him or stop him, he cautiously patted it to his forehead.

It felt heavenly. Icy cold and nicely wet. He didn’t like the idea of the boy’s hands so close to his face, but the towel was so nice. Before long he felt the headache subsiding.

“Are you feeling better? Well enough to make food?”

Jenson opened one eye and peered at the boy. He felt he ought to be angry with the opportunistic little slut’s act. Then again, he had been respectful and quiet and minded his manners. He was growing up, acting much better than before. Jenson smiled softly and patted Sebastian’s hand.

“Yes, I’ll make food. Go set the table.”


	12. Endstation

“So, where are we?” Christian asked once the whole team had sat down. He had grudgingly accepted that Britta and Stefania had cooped themselves up in the lab, but he needed to get somewhere on the case. It had been almost two months since they’d had a full team huddle, in no small part because Toto’s and Christian’s fights were becoming quite legendary. Toto was pressing hard to get them off the case, stating that they had gotten as far as they ever would. The suspect was dead, and they had found everything they would ever find. Christian felt like he was going crazy, thinking in circles, back and forth over the same facts – the few facts they actually had. At his question the members of his team looked at each other. The rundown was going to be quite repetitive.

Britta went over to the whiteboard and unrolled a familiar length of taped-together papers. She and Stefania had compiled all the forms, driver’s licenses, and known dates onto one timeline, trying to make sense of everything. Peter and Cyril had been unable to find anything particularly strange in Button’s financials, except maybe that it was too consistent. Button’s life ran on a schedule that hardly ever changed. That meant, however, that even the little changes were noticeable.

“There’s a big gap in the dates on the forms, that’s the year his stepfather, Alain, died,” Britta said, pointing it out to the room. “After his death, they pick back up to three to four every year.”

“The emissions list,” Stefania said, clearing her throat at the word. It had taken them a little while to figure out what the numbers meant, but they had concluded that it probably meant Button had been measuring his own seminal fluids. It was an uncomfortable detail, and even in the slew of strange details it was one of the stranger ones. “Coincides with some of the form-dates. Those figures are always higher than the others.”

“But we’re no closer to figuring out why he might have been...” Peter looked around before going on. “Doing... that?”

“No, and we have no idea why he started after Vettel was found,” Britta said.

“Killing Sebastian must have set something off, triggered something,” Christian said, clicking his pen. “Go on.”

“The two bodies we can connect to him are Natalie Norton,” Britta pointed to a smiling girl with a bob-cut, “and Sandra Beck.” She pointed to another young woman, with flowing blonde hair and round, blue eyes.

“Connect how?” Otmar asked. He was taking notes, having given up on refereeing Christian and Toto’s fights long ago. He had seemingly kept himself as far away from the case as possible quite willingly. Britta opened a folder on the table and slid it toward Otmar.

“Sandra was found two years ago in a wooded area a few miles outside the town. It’s impossible to determine a cause of death because the body was horribly mutilated, probably assaulted by animals, but there were cuts from a sharp knife or possibly a scalpel on the arms, the face, even the lower ribs... and when we examined the crime scene photos we noticed this.”

Britta pointed to a blow-up of one of the photos of the dead body’s torso. In the mess and faded skin it was hard to see, but circled, roughly in the middle, was a straight cut. It was longer than the stabs and not ragged like the sides of the bigger wound.

“Natalie was found almost twenty years ago, also in the woods but much further away and in the other direction from the Button house.”

The photographs were much worse in quality, but the forensic examiner had made up for it by photographing everything several times. The investigators had obviously known they were dealing with a special case, not least of all because of the traces of sugar found on the body. On the picture of the upper torso two diagonal cuts were clearly visible, starting above either breast.

“So we think he practiced surgery?” Otmar asked, looking through the crime scene photos.

“Autopsy,” Britta corrected. Otmar looked up, his eyebrows raised.

“And why do we think this is his work, other than the similar cuts?”

“Because of this,” Britta said, pointing out a close-up of Natalie’s face. There were markings over the mouth and nose, dots and lines and a bruise covering most of her upper lip.

“What am I looking at?”

“That’s the right hand of a young man wearing driving gloves, just like the ones we found in the basement room. He held her nose between thumb and index finger while pressing the palm of his hand against her mouth.”

Otmar put the picture away, looking bothered.

“It’s almost as if he didn’t know what he was doing,” Britta said thoughtfully, putting the pictures away again. “He pressed down so hard her front teeth were pushed back.”

“And nobody else that we know of was asphyxiated like that?” Otmar asked.

“No,” Christian said, looking up from his own notes. “She was special, for some reason.”

“After that gap, he only killed girls?”

“Apart from Sebastian, yes,” Christian filled in.

“He doesn’t fit the pattern at all,” Toto said, waving his hand impatiently towards the timeline. “The others have cuts, Vettel doesn’t. The others were hidden away, Vettel was found next to the road. The others are all girl, Vettel is not.”

“The same car...” Christian started. Otmar interrupted before Toto could say anything.

“Disregarding that the same car was possibly seen around where Vettel was found and where Sorensen disappeared... we haven’t found Sorensen, have we?”

“No sir,” Christian said reluctantly.

“And we have no timeline for the room? Who built it, where did he get the stuff, anything?”

Peter shook his head. Cyril started explaining.

“We have checked his finances and the only strange thing is how everything stays the same, all the time. Until five years ago,” he pointed to the timeline, “it’s all the same. Then, his food costs go up slightly. He used his card a little bit more.”

“The theory was that this is when he captured Sebastian,” Christian said.

“Three years later, Sebastian is found dead.”

“Do the expenses stop?” Otmar asked, following the details on the timeline.

“That’s just it, they don’t. They increase.”

“What?”

“Vettel is found dead, and Button starts spending even more money. He buys more food, and new clothes,” Cyril said, looking in his papers.

“What’s the theory there?”

“Maybe he... we never found Vettel’s sister. Maybe he took them both, killed the brother, and kept her?” Peter suggested.

“Then the costs would be bigger the other way around,” Toto said, pushing his glasses up.

“He could have kept a boy with him at all times, replacing them?” Stefania asked. “Vettel might be the only one we found?”

The others thought about this for a while.

“One of his co-workers suggested he might have been homosexual,” Toto said, reading the file back.

“Only out of prejudice,” Christian grumbled. “He was unmarried and showed no interest in girls, also a little distant and always neat and tidy.”

“Maybe he only gets off on murdering?” Otmar suggested.

“But why did he start measuring his... himself after Vettel was found?” Britta said.

“And what does it mean that we’ve only found people who don’t have the note ‘no defect’? How were they defective?”

“Some of them have that note about being ‘unviable’, only one has the comment about being ‘aborted’ and that’s Sandra Beck,” Britta said. “But I can’t figure out why she’s cut up the way she is.”

“So all we have are a whole lot of question marks and suspicions,” Otmar sighed. “I mean some of these victims, if they are in fact victims, if those dates are true they were killed when Button was just a kid!”

“He must have learned from someone. Most likely his stepdad,” Toto said, flicking another page. Otmar held up his hands to stop him.

“Button is one thing, we have some kind of evidence there. We are _not_ making a statement tarnishing the reputation of a respected, long-dead man.”

“But...” Christian started.

“We’re getting nowhere. I’m calling off the team. Make a press statement, we move on.”

 

\--

 

Christian was uncomfortable. They had decided on a vague statement which, due to the lack of evidence and therefor missing a long list of anything but possible victims, didn’t draw much attention. He hadn’t been able to resist making the remark that a remarkable young man, an innocent young man, had been taken by this evil presence. The only comfort was that Sebastian no longer suffered. He found no solace in Jenson Button being afforded the same courtesy.

He loosened his tie and sighed, swirling the whiskey in his glass. He hoped never to return here, and he knew that wherever he went, Sebastian Vettel would never leave his mind.


	13. The Start

The very air was tight, cold and wet. Darkness was pressing in like a damp cloth, weighing him down, holding him in place, and there was too little oxygen. There was _no_ oxygen. His mouth was wide open and there was no air, no oxygen, nothing being pulled in to straining lungs or soothing his burning throat.

With a dry rasp the solid air finally yielded, granting him a single breath. His lungs expanded so suddenly his ribs ached trying desperately to contain him, to keep his insides from bursting out as air rushed in, and the heart struck up a desperate beat sending blood rushing in near-still vessels. Jenson wanted to scream but couldn’t. It was pain as he had never known before.

Flames shot up his back when he sat up, like his skin had stuck to the surface he was on and left naked flesh to the cold air. He coughed and rasped, airways dry and brittle, every muscle tense and stiff and hurting. The sound of his breaths and coughs were strangely deadened by the room, well-isolated but hard walls, the echo somehow sharp and dull at the same time. He put his arms around himself, shaking with sudden cold and exertion. Finally, when his breathing was back to normal, he opened his eyes.

He had to blink several times. His eyes felt slimy and slow. There was a low light in the room, bluish and uncomfortable, making the outlines of everything buzz sinisterly. His head was throbbing and it felt very tempting to close his eyes again.

There were three other corpses in the room, laid out on gurneys and covered with blankets like the one that had fallen down into his lap. Naked feet stuck out at the bottom, and each corpse had a tag tied to one toe. Oh. It was a morgue. He was in the house of a fellow professional.

But he was still dressed, still not cut open and analyzed, still not notes in someone’s protocol. He looked around again, his senses slowly winding back up to normal pace. Then he slowly swung his legs over the side of the gurney and put his feet on the floor.

There were stains on his shirt. He must have vomited, or spat up. His body had fought the poison, and having no decay to latch on to the poison had been driven out.

Looking down he saw the tag around his own foot. He bent down to take it off and almost fell over. His body still wasn’t ready, but he’d need to leave. The other corpses would provide plenty of information, no need for him to help. He took off the tag, and noticed his socks and shoes in a bag on the shelf under the gurney. It took a few minutes to find his bearings properly, but then he started moving around the room.

 

Lifting the blanket of his nearest neighbor, he was faced with a middle-aged, brown-haired man without clothes, with a fairly neat incision diagonally from the clavicles down, meeting in the middle, stapled shut. He didn’t usually close his own subjects, but to each their own. He took off the corpse’s tag and put his own in its place.

Carefully, he opened the door. The room he had been in was obviously a separate storage of some sort, because the outside room was much bigger. Here was a familiar metal table, the rows upon rows of subjects hidden in refrigerated drawers, the scent of bleach. He looked around and spotted a clock on the wall. It was past one, probably in the morning. Nobody was working this late, the lights were off, it was quiet.

He put on his socks and shoes and could feel his body getting warmer as he went. There was a sink with a little mirror and two wall-mounted dispensers, one for soap and one for antiseptic. He washed his hands thoroughly, all the way up to the elbow. There was no telling how many people had touched him and breathed on him. Not wanting to take any risks, he used the soap to wash his face as well. Then he drank from his hands, the cold water chilling in his belly and cooling his raw throat.

Walking around a little, he felt unconcerned. He was dead and yet not dead. There was nothing _here_ to worry about. Still, he opened the next door carefully, finding some kind of lobby. A coat hung over by a door, and he put it on. It felt strange and it was probably not clean, but his body was cold, not quite ready to heat itself fully. On a desk there was a computer, still on but with the screen turned off.

Being dead in the eyes of the police could have some definite benefits.

He found his own intake-file. It looked like it was all computerized, so he wouldn’t have to look for a paper copy. At the bottom somebody had noted “B. Roeske, FBI, no process!!!”. Jenson deleted the file. Then he looked for his own name in the short list of subjects. He was in a group of four, all marked “B”. It was probably the room he had been in. The other three corpses were scheduled to be taken to cremation. With a little smile, Jenson deleted a Mr. Stevens from the list, and copied the cremation-order and put it by his own name.

He walked out into the hallway, meeting nobody. Opening the first door marked “exit”, he walked out into the night, not looking back once.


	14. Epilogue

The bar was pretty dark, but the beer was cold and nobody was bothering him. The others had already left; the traditional closed-case celebrations seemed to be getting shorter the older he and his co-workers got, he thought with a sigh. With age he had also realized that the solved cases mattered less and less to him. Closure for the others, for families of victims, and getting killers off the street, that mattered. But for his own sake, he didn’t care.

Maybe it was the lot of those who investigated crime, he thought. That there would always, eventually, be that one case that stuck with you, where closure was denied, where the investigator was the only one who cared.

He got up from his booth and looked around the bar reflexively. A few tables were taken. It wasn’t very late, far from closing time, and the crowd was pretty quiet, just people wanting a drink or a bite to eat together. It looked nice. Sometimes he missed it. Having a normal life, a girlfriend, friends who didn’t discuss horrific murders or missing children. He considered staying and drinking the thoughts away, but he’d come in his own car.

The wistful thoughts followed him back to the motel he and his colleagues were staying in. The parking lot was quiet and the windows of the motel were mostly dark. All the signs were telling him to get to bed. Tomorrow would be another day. He unlocked the door and went inside.

Behind him, the door took just a little too long to close.

 

He turned to shut it, and was face to face with a man. He was taller than Christian, quite broad-shouldered, and he looked eerily familiar.

“Who the hell are you?” Christian asked. The man smiled, closing the door behind himself but keeping his eyes on Christian.

“I think you know who I am, Mr. Horner.”

He adjusted one of his gloves; Christian hadn’t noticed the man was wearing gloves, black leather driving gloves with two red patches along the index- and middle finger on his right hand.

Christian had the sudden feeling of falling through the floor. He recognized the face, but it had been years since he had last seen it and even then it had only ever been in photographs. Jenson Button’s smile grew a little bigger.

“I’m here to correct you on a few points of misrepresentation.” He spoke calmly and his words had a rehearsed quality about them. “Put the gun on the desk please, and we can have a civilized conversation.”

“I don’t have a gun,” Christian said. Jenson’s eyes flashed in sudden anger.

“Don’t take me for a fool, Mr. Horner. I saw you in the pub, you’re armed. Now put it away.”

The hair at the back of Christian’s neck stood up at the implication that Button had seen him at the bar. He certainly hadn’t noticed him. Slowly, he reached for his gun. Button wasn’t holding a gun, and he had no other visible weapons on him. Christian made a sudden motion for it and Button reacted, however not as Christian had thought. Instead of reaching for the gun, which would have given Christian a second to follow the motion, step back, and get his aim in, Jenson took a step forward and punched him.

Christian’s hand tangled in his jacket and the punch hit him in the mouth. It was the second of bad luck and surprise Button needed to get the drop on him. Before he knew it he heard his gun land on the desk.

“I asked you very nicely, it would have been better manners to just do as I asked. I really _do_ just want to talk.” Button still looked angry, like he was considering punching him again.

“So talk,” Christian spat.

“Get on your knees and take off your belt,” Jenson ordered. Christian looked at him in disbelief. Jenson picked up the gun, weighing it in his hand. He looked at it almost curiously.

“These are pretty easy to use, aren’t they? Point and click? I’m pretty sure I could hit you from over here, even with my limited experience.”

There was no arguing with that. Christian got down on his knees and took off his belt. Jenson had him put his wrists into it and then looped it around, pulling it tight and then threading the end into the loop again, securing it.

“It’s been a while but I dare say you’re still quite interested in Sebastian?”

It was strange to hear someone else refer to him by his first name. Most of his fellow agents used his last name, or, around Christian, just ‘the case’ or ‘that missing boy’. It had been three years since they’d left that case behind, and Christian still thought about it every single day.

“But I have to wonder where you got the misguided impression that he was somehow innocent?”

“Misguided?” Christian said, shaking his head. “You _destroyed_ Sebastian, you kept him in that house, doing god knows what, and then when he was used up, you... you threw him out like he was _trash_ , and...” It felt good to be indignant, to raise his voice. It felt good that Jenson was there to hear it, even if he was just a ghost.

“No no no,” Jenson said, interrupting him. “Sebastian _lived_ with me for several years, there was nothing illicit going on! And I certainly didn’t kill him.”

“You dumped his body in the fucking wilderness!”

Jenson stepped forward and slapped him in the face.

“Stop interrupting me. I didn’t kill Sebastian, I took him in and I taught him manners and life skills.”

Christian stared. He was surprised more than hurt. They had been working on the theory that Sebastian had been forced to help Jenson while being held captive.

“You made him a murderer,” he said in disbelief. “You... you took that boy and...”

Another slap, and this one stung.

“You’re not listening to me, Mr. Horner.” He sounded frustrated. Then he narrowed his eyes. “Do you have children?”

“Why?”

“Because if you had children or got involved with the young people who come to your agency, then you would understand. I would never _hurt_ Sebastian, and like I said, I didn’t kill him.”

“We found Sebastian’s body in...”

“No, you didn’t,” Jenson said, slapping him again. “I spent two years teaching Sebastian to be a better man, building him up, and then you came barging in, ruining everything.”

He smiled again. Christian didn’t say anything.

“There. See? You’re learning already. Good. Now then. Since leaving my care due to your meddling, Sebastian has been on the road. He’s homeless, selling his body and getting in trouble. How exactly is that better than what I offered him?”

“Like you weren’t using him to satisfy all your sick needs,” Christian said in a low voice. This time Button didn’t slap him. He actually looked disgusted.

“No,” he said after a little while. “No. The little slut tried to seduce me, several times, that’s just in his nature. But no. I would never.” He mumbled something under his breath and Christian was almost certain he’d heard the words “shameless little twink”.

“Let’s say I believe you,” Christian said. If he could keep Button talking, he was sure he could think his way out of this. “Who was the boy in the creek?”

“I have no idea, does it matter?” Jenson replied, shrugging. “It wasn’t Sebastian, I can tell you that.”

“You don’t care?”

Jenson actually laughed. “Goodness no, he was a corpse!”

“He was already dead?”

“We’re all corpses, Mr. Horner. From the time we’re born, we start dying.”

“Then that goes for you too.” Christian couldn’t stop himself from saying it. He expected at least another slap. Instead he was met by a broad grin.

“No Mr. Horner. I’m already dead.”

 

Christian had a surreal, continuous swooping in his stomach. They had worked the case for a pretty long time and now he was face to face with a killer. The only times he had ever met murderers before had been during arrests, and interrogations either in police stations or in prison. He did his best to remain rational and professional. He’d been shot at before; this was the same kind of life-threatening situation, only moving a bit slower.

“Look, I really just came to ask you to stop spreading lies about Sebastian, it doesn’t benefit him. He was no perfect little angel.”

“That’s why you killed him?”

This time the slap was even harder, actually making him turn his head. Jenson looked livid.

“You’re _not listening_!” he said, raising his voice. “I didn’t kill Sebastian, he’s still very much alive.” He looked down at Christian for a little while as if studying him.

“Are you going to kill me?” Since Button was speaking quite freely about who he had and hadn’t killed, Christian figured it was okay to ask.

Jenson shook his head.

“I have no intention of killing you. You’re completely unviable. Just like Sebastian.” He started bending down like he was going to pick something up off the floor. “Only he had potential,” he added quickly.

“Potential?” Christian spat, the picture of the smiling fourteen-year-old boy set in his mind. “ _You_ made him do terrible, horrible things, and...”

He was slapped again, three times this time, like Button couldn’t stop himself. His nostrils flared while he took a few deep breaths as if to calm himself. Then he bent down and pulled up the leg of his pants, revealing a carpet knife.

“Mr. Horner, I consider myself a patient man, but you might just be too old a dog to learn new tricks.” He pressed the blade up out of the handle. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to, but you obviously need something to remind you. So I will tell you this again: I did not kill Sebastian. Nor did I have any kind of...” he wisped the knife around in the air, “... inappropriate contact with him. Everything that has happened to him since he left my care, Mr. Horner... that is entirely _your_ fault.”

 

He was efficient. There was no knowledge to be gained from it, so he did it quickly. Jenson pushed Christian backwards, sliced open his shirt and then made the familiar incision. Left clavicle and down to the xyphoid, right clavicle and to the same spot. He’d pulled off one of Christian’s socks, balling it up and sticking it in his mouth, and it was a good thing too. At first he was worried that he’d cut too deep with all the gasses, but no, it was just hot air, not the lungs, nothing vital. The last incision went from the middle and down to the navel. Not deep enough to open the corpse, just enough to put his mark on it, to remind it forever.

“I will tell you this only one more time, Mr. Horner. Leave Sebastian alone.”

Christian had tears running from his eyes and was breathing with short, shallow breaths. His teeth were clenched into the sock, he looked quite deranged. Jenson got up from the floor and it was a single second of instability that Christian seized upon. He sat up as quickly as his could, his chest stinging terribly, and got hold of the blade. He’d grabbed mostly the handle and Jenson stumbled, just a short step, but he stumbled. Christian swung wildly and sliced through both the pants and skin of his right thigh.

Jenson cursed. It hurt, it made him see red, but he couldn’t end Christian. He sunk his fist into the corpse’s face, grabbed the blade, and got out of there as fast as he could. He looked down at the gash in his leg when he was back outside in his car. He would have to learn how to suture. Still, he had accomplished what he had come for: Sebastian had his continued blessing, and Jenson had a new life, one that needed careful tending.

**Author's Note:**

> All in good fun, as per usual! :)  
> Thanks for the read. Kudoses and comments are much loved and well received. <3


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